quote Bonhoeffer, who pointed out that it was an “Anglo-Saxon failing” to imagine that the church was supposed to have a ready answer for every social problem. Will’s friend, and another patron saint of ours (and another guy in a robe), Thomas Merton, said, “Before you do a damned thing, just be what you say you are, a Christian; then no one will have to tell you what to do. You’ll know.”7
After four days of sitting on the porch and watching cows graze, telling stories, and reading books, going for walks and just hanging out, we point ourselves toward home and the work of ministry which awaits us. Every gathering, twice a year for twenty-five years, we end our Neighborhood in a circle, arms around each other, and someone prays. We are grateful. God’s grace is sufficient. The Hood abides.
7. Quoted in Campbell, Up to Our Steeples in Politics, 152 –53.
I’m a Preacher
Rodney Wallace Kennedy
Will Campbell often said he was a preacher. That has always been good enough for me. Minister, pastor, rector, father—the list of names for clergy seem endless—but preacher works for me. I am a preacher and a teacher of preachers. The teaching of preaching saddens and gladdens my heart. It is ecstasy and agony. The sadness comes from how preaching has been demoted to the back of the curriculum and MDiv graduates are sent out to face congregations armed with one course in the introduction to preaching. Along with allowing students to graduate without sniffing a Greek New Testament or a Hebrew Bible, the insufficient attention paid to preaching galls me.
What gladdens my heart are my students. When they struggle to understand the rich rhetorical theory that is the burden of David Buttrick’s magisterial textbook, Homiletic, I smile. Preaching ought to be a struggle and never be about being flip, comfortable, cute, or nice. When my students resist the gigantic reading lists that I impose on them, they wince and I insist they start now with the habit of being life-long readers. If law school is supposed to teach you to think, seminary should teach you to read. As Stanley Hauerwas reminds us, what we learned to do in seminary was read. He adds, “I like to think that seminaries might be best understood as schools of rhetoric.”8
Not all my students are convinced that reading matters as much as I claim. One student, a semester after making an “A” in my class, saw me at an event. He hustled over to greet me and said, “Dr. Kennedy, I like what you said about reading. I want you to know I have read a book this year.” It was September!
Stanley Hauerwas, in a commencement address at Eastern Mennonite Seminary, argues that seminary is meant to prepare you to spend a life reading. “You must continue to read and study even though you may receive little reward for doing so.”9 Whenever you are tempted to do mindless ministerial chores, get another great big book and read some more.
One time I read that the average rabbi reads six times more books per year than the average Protestant preacher. My competitive juices shifted into overdrive and I decided to do something about that. The rabbi at Temple Israel, David Sofian, turns out to be a voracious reader and has become my best friend. We push one another and it has been a blessing. We are currently arguing about the meaning of holiness and writing a book about it. When we need to have fun, we invite our Episcopal priest friend, Jack Koepke, to join us at the Wine Gallery and we do stand-up comedy. Our act is called “A Rabbi, A Priest, and A Preacher Walk into a Bar.” You wouldn’t believe the amount of reading required to prepare a fifteen-minute comedy skit.
Preachers are the last generalists on the planet. That means our reading lists require us to sit, hat in hand, before all the other disciplines. A preaching professor once told me that I should be reading six books from six different disciplines at all times. The year was 1978 and I took him literally, because in 1978 I took everything literally. Hell, I even still read newspapers—The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Dayton Daily News.
As a preacher, the most helpful genre of reading is novels and short stories, especially short stories by Southern writers. Reynolds Price claims that the novel comes closer to being a truly Christian form. In its attempt to elicit understanding of and mercy for all creation, the novel teaches mercy and forgiveness for all creation. As Allan Gurganus puts it, “There are those who believe that the sermon is the primary literary form of American life. From Cotton Mather’s surreal visions of hell to Hawthorne’s allegories of American guilt, to Whitman’s promissory hymns, to Twain’s biting moralizing satires, to Dreiser’s Aschcan School of Social Darwinism, to Faulkner’s postlapsarian South, to Flannery O’Connor’s godless modernity vs. ancient mysteries, to Marilynne Robinson’s watery, postmodern version of heaven and hell in Housekeeping, we feel the sermon’s lash and balm in every great American book.”10 It is this connection between fiction and preaching that led me to the practice of having my homiletics students read a short story for every class during the semester. I hold up the story as the form the sermon takes.11 When our sermons can be compared to the parables of Jesus, we will know that we are touching the hem of the garment of the greatest preaching possible.
Preachers are apprenticed to reading. Only by reading are we able to train our minds to receive the word that may come from God. Harry Crews, Southern novelist, said that he got his practice of sitting at the typewriter every day for three hours from Flannery O’Connor. He speaks of what we write as a mystery, knowing that we can’t explain where we get the stuff we write. Crews quotes O’Connor: “I go to the typewriter every day for three hours so if anything comes, I am prepared to receive it.”12
Pat Conroy’s My Reading Life inspires my own reading to this moment. He also taught me that the best writers/preachers have larcenous skills. I try to teach my students to at least steal good material and to have enough preaching sense to know good material from so-so stuff.
Pat Conroy says, “Because I was raised Roman Catholic, I never feared taking any unchaperoned walks through the fields of language. Words lifted me up and filled me with pleasure. I’ve never met a word I was afraid of, just ones that left me indifferent or that I knew I wouldn’t ever put to use. When reading a book, I’ll encounter words that please me, goad me into action, make me want to sing a song. I dislike pretentious words, those highfaluting ones with a trust fund and an Ivy League education. Often they were stillborn in the minds of academics, critics, scientists. They have a tendency to flash their warning lights in the middle of a good sentence.”13
I work hard to turn my students into word sleuths. A few more nuggets from Conroy: “I could build a castle from the words I steal from books I cherish.” “I hunt down words that have my initials branded on their flanks.” “Words call out my name when I need them to make something worthy out of language.”14
Working with words is a long, patient apprenticeship and preachers have the privilege of serving them. And the place words hang out are in the hundreds of books you are reading and will read. So when I ask you, “What are you reading,” I am not making small talk. I’m asking you the most significant question in the world. I have a Pat Conroy saying printed and sitting on my desk: “To be boring is not just a sin; it’s a crime.”15
8. Hauerwas, Working with Words,
